


Regrowth

by Anonymous033



Series: For However Far We Run [4]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Mentioned Laurel Lance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 18:29:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4070152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymous033/pseuds/Anonymous033
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had seen her before on his visits, the gardener. // To Charlie, whose brilliance is incomparable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Regrowth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thelittlegreennotebook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlegreennotebook/gifts).



> This fic picks up after the end of a relationship between Laurel and Oliver, and so describes the process of Oliver moving on from the break-up. All ships/characters are meant to be presented in a non-negative light.

He often took Laurel to the gardens. Laurel was an ambitious woman with goals that lay far beyond what he could see, but she loved the gardens and he loved her. It was only on the weekends, with his hand wrapped around hers and her power suit exchanged for a sundress, that she relaxed and showed her playful side. He lived for those moments.

His relationship with Laurel lasted no more than two years. After that, he avoided the gardens, not having any more reason to go there.

One morning, he woke up with an ache in his chest. On some days, he missed Laurel more than on others, and this was one of those days.

He headed down to the gardens and buried himself in a secluded spot. So many times had he visited the garden by now that he thought he knew the places no one passed by and where no one would disturb him—but that was when she, the gardener, happened upon him.

She had not caught his eye at first. He had seen her before on his visits, the gardener. She always wore blue coveralls and a green top; a pair of black-framed glasses and a ponytail of honey-coloured hair. But that was all he ever noticed about her.

This time, he heard her before he saw her. He did not know it was her at first: Only heard the familiar _snipsnipsnip_ of a tree being pruned. On this occasion, however, it was accompanied by the hum of a melody, distracted yet musical, in a feminine voice. He recognized neither the tune nor the voice. Then the coveralls made their appearance.

The gardener stopped short when she saw him and cleared her throat awkwardly. “I didn’t know there was anyone here,” she said, so sheepishly that he had to stop himself from smiling.

He did not feel like smiling. Not yet.

“S’cool,” he answered. “I can come back later, if you need to prune this area.”

She lowered her shears and looked at him thoughtfully. “People usually walk aroundif they’re here for the flowers,” she informed him. “And if they’re not, they usually have a book or a picnic basket or even a tablet—which is me when I’m on break. You have none of that.”

He made a gesture of indifference. “Maybe I’m here for another reason.”

She gave him a stern look. “It better not be anything deviant like setting a rose bush on fire or something like that.”

A bark of laughter escaped his mouth before he could stop himself. “I would say ‘it is,’ but I make it a point never to anger people with shears.” He sobered with a sigh. “I’m just here to mourn a breakup.”

“Oh.” The cute gardener blinked and pushed her glasses up her nose. When she withdrew her hand, she looked weirdly saddened to him. “I’m sorry,” she offered. “I can come back in the afternoon, if you like. But I fully expect you to be gone by then, because no one should have to mope for too long.”

It made him ache, her words. “Thank you,” he said quietly, swallowing the lump in his throat. “I would appreciate that.”

\-----------------------------

He was still there, acting the recluse, when she returned in the afternoon.

She narrowed her eyes at him, and he admitted, “I just wanted someone not in the situation to talk to.”

She squatted down next to him and set to work with her shears—wisely, he noted, not asking about his family or his friends. “Breakups can suck,” she told him in a low voice.

He waited, but no elaboration was forthcoming. “That’s it?” he asked. Her statement seemed almost incomplete. “No words of advice?”

She gave him a surprised look. “I know nothing about your relationship.”

“Yeah, but…” He paused. He did not know ‘but’ _what;_ it just felt like her sympathy lacked something he could not identify.

She stopped doing what she was doing and patted his forearm, leaving the shears to dangle dangerously in mid-air held by her other hand. “I’m not a wise old man on the mountain,” she told him. “Breakups do suck, but that’s all I know. That’s why I keep an emergency stash of chocolate around. Eat up.”

With that, she unceremoniously tossed him the chocolate bar she had pulled out of her pocket. The packaging was slightly rumpled. But he opened it and bit into it, anyway, because he had skipped lunch. “Thank you,” he mumbled.

She continued pruning the hedge.

He sat with his eyes closed for the next half hour, savouring the chocolate bar bite by bite, and listened to the calming sounds of her working.

\-----------------------------

The first time he went back was a week after he had talked to her.

He was not sure if he would see her again. After all, their bumping into each other had been pure happenstance.

But then he had been settled for merely an hour when her head popped around the corner.

“I’m doing another section today,” she said before walking off.

He stood up and followed her because even though she clearly did not expect him to, he knew she did not mind if he followed her.

Like the week before, he closed his eyes and listened to her prune the hedges.

Before he knew it, their meetings became a weekly routine. She never spoke to him beyond the perfunctory ‘hi’ and ‘bye,’ although she did sometimes hum random snippets of songs; he never followed her beyond the immediate vicinity of the area that she led him to. It was half an hour of company that, aside from an agreement to coexist within the same space, had neither strings nor expectations.

He came to love it.

It was perhaps on their sixth meeting that he started to speak. The topic was a completely neutral one: The coffee machine at his workplace had been broken by someone. In reply, she irrelevantly provided him with the list of coffees she liked. The next week, he showed up with a cup of coffee for her and talked to her about cats and dogs. The week after that, he showed up with another cup of coffee, and they talked about siblings (he had a younger sister; she had none).

For all her remarkable ability to stay silent back when he had not wanted to talk at all, he could not get her to shut up once he started conversing with her.

“So, why do you work on Saturdays?” he asked on their ninth meeting. “Don’t they give you a break?”

She laughed. “This is actually a part-time job,” she confessed. “Monday to Friday, I work at a local computer repair shop. But it doesn’t pay a lot and I need the extra money, so here I am.”

He hummed. “They seem so different—horticulture and technology.”

“Computers are my passion,” she answered. “I was planning to go to MIT. Plants are just a hobby. I like how they brighten up the world even though they’re so still and unassuming. I haven’t had a lot of peace in my life, and I like how the trees and stuff just help me … meld into them, if that makes sense. You don’t get to do that with computers ‘cause you’re the one controlling the processes—not the other way around.”

“Is that why you didn’t go to MIT in the end? ‘Cause you said ‘was.’”

For the first time since they started speaking, she tensed.

“No,” she answered eventually. “My mom has a lot of health issues, and she needs someone to look out for her. Since it’s just her and me, I stayed behind to do it.”

“Oh.”

“But that’s okay,” she added quickly. “I can go to MIT at any point of my life. Until then, I have my plants to keep me sane.”

\-----------------------------

“I never asked your name,” he said on his eleventh visit.

She looked up from the leaves she was raking to give him a small smile. “Felicity Smoak. Starling City High, class of ‘06. IT specialist on weekdays and gardener on the weekends.”

“‘06?” he parroted, surprised. “That’s longer ago than I thought it would be.”

“I graduated when I was sixteen,” she told him.

“Wow,” he breathed, and her cheeks coloured a little bit.

“It’s no big deal,” she murmured quietly.

“What?” he protested. “Of course it is. You’re genius-level smart, Felicity. And…”

“And what?” she asked, her voice abruptly sharp when he trailed off. It stung, but he bit back his puzzlement at her hostility and waited for her explanation. “Please don’t say it’s a pity my mother has _problems,_ and I decided to stay behind and not do my tertiary studies. I chose this, and I would choose it again because _she_ worked two jobs just to raise _me,_ and it wasn’t perfect and I was the devil child, but she tried her best with me and I’m going to try my best with her.”

It was fierce, and unyielding in its defence. But her voice broke at the end of her sentence and her eyes were now glimmering, and he could see just how much it pained her to be so alone. Carefully, he reached out and wrapped his hands around hers; her shoulders slumped, and she lowered her head and sucked in her bottom lip.

“I was going to say,” he returned, “that I feel much less worthy to ask you what I was going to ask you. And that’s even more the case now that you’ve given me your little speech.”

She rolled a shoulder, clearly unashamed of her defensiveness. “What were you going to ask me?”

“If you’d—if you’d like to go out … to dinner … with me someday.”

She frowned, pulling her hands from his and pushing her glasses up her nose again. “Like on a date?”

“Well…. Yes.”

“I’m not—I’m not—in a position to—I’m not,” she stuttered, “dating material. But I’m not interested in being somebody’s rebound girl.”

“Rebound girl?” He raised his eyebrows. “It’s been almost four months.”

“And most of that, you have spent platonically talking to me.” She looked squarely up at him. “Don’t think I don’t know who you are. You’re Oliver Queen, and you could get any girl in this city that you wanted. For God knows what reason, you’ve been spending your Saturday mornings with me, but let’s be honest: I’m not the kinda girl you’d want to spend your Saturday nights with. And I _don’t_ even mean … in the sleeping-together sense. Just in the dating sense. I’m not the kind of girl you’d want to date.”

“Why not?”

“Because!” she barked, obviously frustrated by his incomprehension. “Oliver, look at me. I’m wearing coveralls and I probably have leaves in my hair and I just told you my life story. Which part of that sounds glamorous to you?”

“I don’t care what it sounds like,” he murmured. “I care about where it could go. And I think there could be more to your story, and I’d like to know ‘bout it.”

“Are you even listening to yourself?”

“Probably not.” He shrugged, unconcerned by her incredulity. “I don’t need to hear myself if I have already thought about what I was going to say.”

Her blue eyes widened behind her glasses, and she stilled. “You have thought about this?”

“For the past few weeks,” he admitted. “But I held off because I didn’t even know your name, and I thought I should at least have that before I asked you to go out with me.”

Her brow furrowed. “So, it’s not a pity date?”

“If I did,” he began carefully, “have any reason other than that I really like you for asking you out—it would be awe. Because you are _remarkable,_ Felicity. And I would really, really like the opportunity to tell you again.”

It made her clench her jaw and blink rapidly. “Okay,” she said, her voice thick. “Okay. I think we can try it out. I don’t know if it would work, Oliver … especially with my commitments. But I’m willing to find out.”

He knew it would work. So, he reached out once more for her hands, giving her time to pull away if she wanted to—she met him halfway instead.

“See? We’re working already,” he said, and she smiled at him.

\-----------------------------

Two years later, he loudly crowed an ‘I told you so’ to her face as they slipped matching engagement bands onto each other’s fingers.

* * *

Crossposted to: [Tumblr](http://anonymous033.tumblr.com/post/111615412347/regrowth-an-olicity-one-shot-au-setting-very)

 


End file.
